Los Angeles Oil Pumps as The Perpetual Motion Machine

Perpetual motion would occur in a device or system if a motion, once started, were to continue indefinitely. Oil pumps in Los Angeles started drilling for oil in 1892, when a miner named Edward Doheny began drilling for oil on a residential lot to the northeast of the then-small town of Los Angeles; and oil pumps in L. A. had never stop moving since that moment. Can we refer to perpetual motion when talking about oil pumps?

While travelling across Los Angeles, driving through its freeways and looking to the new landscapes from a second nature created by oil pumps, you can only think in two things: the old cliche to reference dinosaurs that mammoth mentions at their post or the sense of perpetual motion.

The documented search for perpetual motion begins in the 13th century. Villard de Honnescourt drew designs for such machines at that time. There may be earlier designs, but perpetual motion is closely linked to machines, especially rotating machines, and machines are neither widespread nor very sophisticated before this time. The search continues to the present day. More recent designs for perpetual motion appear in response to crises, like the energy crisis, or high costs of fuels, or some poorly understood technological need.

As Ruchala suggest, without oil, the region would have turned out to be a far different place, and this second nature that now is part of the urban landscape, may have not been there in its perpetual pumping activity. For millennia, it was not clear whether perpetual motion devices were possible or not, but the development of modern thermodynamics has indicated that they are impossible. Despite this, many attempts have been made to construct a perpetual motion machine and that’s why we think it’s interesting to make this speculative similarity between perpetual motion machines and oil pumps in Los Angeles.

Although considered impossible by scientists, perpetual motion continues to capture the imagination of inventors. In 1900, Nikola Tesla claimed to have discovered an abstract method on which to base a perpetual motion machine, he wrote:

A departure from known methods – possibility of a “self-acting” engine or machine, inanimate, yet capable, like a living being, of deriving energy from the medium – the ideal way of obtaining motive power.

In The Order of Time, Reidar Finsrud proposes what he called the first working perpetuum mobile in human history. Finsrud was trying to do with his machine what Tesla described once, when he said: “One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe […] and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery.”

Perpetual Mobile, Reidar Finsrud

Perpetual Mobile, Reidar Finsrud

Most of oil infrastructures in Los Angeles are part of the “hidden city” that Ruchala describes in his article, and these oil pumps are maybe the only part of the whole infrastructure that hasn’t been camouflaged neither balkanized by private companies that have always controlled this industry. These oil fields are part of the most unique and some times dystopic landscapes in California and especially in Los Angeles. They are, in Ruchala’s words, between infrastructure and landscape and somehow, it’s perpetual motion is the last sign of the industrial face of the city, before it reshapes its image and become a totally new L. A., a post-industrial city.

The legacy of Oil fields remains. We can quote Ruchala when he wrote:

Even as the oil industry disappears from view in Los Angeles, it will never truly vanish, but will always remain just under the surface, a toxic pillow of liquid unsettling the city. In its refusal to obey our wishes, oil reminds us that our actions on the land have created a second nature.

With a sort of blind faith in technique, it seems that we are still on in the search of the perpetual motion, while Los Angeles oil pumps that still remains in the field, remind us a time where all of us were confident on perpetual oil search.

This is a pretty fantastic take on oil culture… I especially enjoyed the various failed perpetual motion machines.

During my stint in economic policy, I was most struck by the unspoken yet universal assumption that nearly limitless growth was possible or desirable. (And the corresponding futility of injecting alternative perspectives into the equation.) Resource limits seldom entered into the discussion – and if they did, it was with the comment that profit-seeking technological change would inevitably provide a substitute for any minerals or energy sources that were running low.

We also agree that the universal assumption on unlimited growth is the wrong way to face the future. As we recently commented in another post, most people have the belief that science and technology will find the solution and take us through the path of “sustainable development.” But we think that technique and technology are important, as long as they are reinforced by common sense.

Your post and all the maps and data you present are further evidence that the system does not correspond with common sense.

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